With our flight to Auckland scheduled for 9:45am we only had time for breakfast before heading to check in. Once at the gate we noticed there were alot of New Zealand rugby players hanging by the gate. The first group of players belonged to the New Zealand Kiwis, the New Zealand National Rugby League Team. And we thought the National Rugby team was The All Blacks!

Apparently there are two different Rugby leagues with different sets of rules.

• The Rugby League - The New Zealand Kiwis
• The Ruby Union - The All Blacks

Now that we learned all this, neither of them were on our flight.
But, we still had a quite impressive Rugby team on our flight, the New Zealand Warriors, the Auckland rugby league team. They were in Wellington for a National Rugby League premiership game the night before. The Warriors beat Australia’s Newcastle Knights 20-12 and everyone was in a great mood!

Once in Auckland we headed to our Hotel, Park Hyatt and got lucky, a room was already available. We grabbed a great lunch at one of the hotel restaurants before heading out for a stroll along the harbor and to figure out how the ferries to Waiheke work (preparation for tomorrow).

On our way we walked past Hilton, the hotel we originally planned for our last two nights. The customer service team at Hilton contacted us a few days ago to inform us that a cruise ship was planned to be in Auckland during our stay and that the view from our room might be impacted in case we got placed on the cruise ship side.
We didn't want to gamble with having a cruise ship directly outside our window and changed our reservation to Hyatt.
Extremely happy we did!

Dinner was enjoyed at Sid at The French Café, said to be one of th best restaurants in Auckland and it was amazing. Great food and very friendly staff, would definitely recommend.